EDA, IP Growth Surges Again


EDA tools and IP revenue increased 8.9% in Q3 of 2022 to $3.767 billion, up from $3.458 billion in 2021, according to a just-released report from the ESD Alliance at SEMI. All regions except Japan reported growth, but the numbers were a bit more uneven in Q3 than in recent quarters. For example, total silicon IP dropped 1%, while services revenue grew 20.8%. At the same time, EDA revenue jum... » read more

Selecting The Right RISC-V Core


With an increasing number of companies interested in devices based on the RISC-V ISA, and a growing number of cores, accelerators, and infrastructure components being made available, either commercially or in open-source form, end users face an increasingly difficult challenge of ensuring they make the best choices. Each user likely will have a set of needs and concerns that almost equals th... » read more

Design And Verification Methodologies Breaking Down


Tools, methodologies and flows that have been in place since the dawn of semiconductor design are breaking down, but this time there isn't a large pool of researchers coming up with potential solutions. The industry is on its own to formulate those ideas, and that will take a lot of cooperation between EDA companies, fabs, and designers, which has not been their strong point in the past. It ... » read more

Hardware Trojan Detection Case Study Based on 4 Different ICs Manufactured in Progressively Smaller CMOS Process Technologies


A technical paper titled "Red Team vs. Blue Team: A Real-World Hardware Trojan Detection Case Study Across Four Modern CMOS Technology Generations" was published by researchers at Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Ruhr University Bochum, and Bundeskriminalamt. "In this work, we aim to improve upon this state of the art by presenting a... » read more

Reducing Simulation Regression Turnaround Time With Dynamic Performance Optimization


No single step in the development of semiconductor devices is more sensitive to speed than functional simulation. A modern system-on-chip (SoC) design simulates billions of cycles of operation in the process of completing the verification plan and achieving coverage goals. To validate full system functionality, many of these simulations include running code on one or more embedded processors. E... » read more

How Secure Are RISC-V Chips?


When the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities were first uncovered in 2018, they heralded an industry-wide shift in perspective regarding processor security. As the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index put it the following year, "2018 ushered in a new era of hardware security challenges that forced enterprises and the security community to rethink the way they approach hardware security." R... » read more

Hardware Fuzzing (U. of Michigan, Google, Virginia Tech)


A technical paper titled "Fuzzing Hardware Like Software" was published by researchers at University of Michigan, Google and Virginia Tech. The paper was presented at the 2022 Usenix Security Symposium. Abstract: "Hardware flaws are permanent and potent: hardware cannot be patched once fabricated, and any flaws may undermine even formally verified software executing on top. Consequently, ve... » read more

12 Ways To Elevate Electronic Design Process Using PADS eBook


When using PADS Professional Premium, designers have access to standard PCB design functionality, such as schematic definition and physical layout, as well previously optional add-on features (now standard) and all of the latest cloud apps, including: Schematic definition: Access to everything you need: Circuit design and simulation, Component selection, library management, and signal integr... » read more

Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) For Verification, With Better Memory Safety (Oxford)


A technical paper titled "A Formal CHERI-C Semantics for Verification" was published by researchers at University of Oxford. Abstract: "CHERI-C extends the C programming language by adding hardware capabilities, ensuring a certain degree of memory safety while remaining efficient. Capabilities can also be employed for higher-level security measures, such as software compartmentalization, ... » read more

Taking Power Much More Seriously


An increasing number of electronic systems are becoming limited by thermal issues, and the only way to solve them is by elevating energy consumption to a primary design concern rather than a last-minute optimization technique. The optimization of any system involves a complex balance of static and dynamic techniques. The goal is to achieve maximum functionality and performance in the smalles... » read more

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